Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Embodiments relate to user interfaces visualizing stored data, and in particular, to methods and apparatuses that automatically create a break in a chart axis in order to enhance data visualization.
Databases and overlying applications referencing data stored therein, offer a powerful way of storing and analyzing complex related data. In particular, through the skillful presentation of data in the form of tables and charts, a user can describe complex issues and the factual and forecast data underlying those issues.
Stored data may be effectively visualized using a variety of chart formats in order to afford insight to a user. In some cases, coarse disparities or similarities in the magnitude of stored data values may mask fine-grained but important differences between them.
One example is where the values of each of a plurality of data points is in the thousands, but key differences between those data points are only in the single digits. In such a situation, a chart visualizing the data points may allocate excessive resources to depicting the large (1000's) overall magnitudes of the data values, without providing sufficient visual information to allow the user to appreciate small (single digit) differences arising between those values being visualized.
Another example may involve outlier data whose overall values differ significantly from the other data points being visualized. In such a situation, a chart visualizing all of the data points together may allocate excessive resources to depicting the large overall magnitudes of difference between the outlier(s) and the remaining data points, such that the user is unable to appreciate small differences.
Conventional approaches may allow a user to manually alter a chart in order to enhance data visualization, by inserting a break along an axis. Such a break reduces an amount of space allocated to certain common or exceptional (outlier) data values, thereby emphasizing contrast with the data sought to be visualized.
However, such manual insertion of chart axis breaks can be time consuming and labor intensive, as the user is tasked with assessing relative magnitudes and then interacting with the display. This burden on the user may become especially heavy where a large number of data points are to be visualized and/or the data is often updated, calling for frequent manual intervention.